A woman has drawn an angry response after opting to skip her older sister's wedding after the bride chose to make it a child-free event.
The decision came despite the fact the woman has no children of her own. It's a move that has sparked uproar on social media after she took to Reddit to defend her decision not to attend the nuptials.
At the time of writing, the post, which was shared under the handle u/Vegetable-Car-5668, has earned close to 13,000 upvotes, with several fellow Reddit users left thoroughly unimpressed at the woman's alleged actions.
The Knot's 2023 Global Wedding Report estimates that in 2022, couples shelled out an average of $30,000 on their weddings.
Given that kind of expenditure, it's perhaps understandable that the bride and groom would want things to go off without a hitch. Unfortunately, children have been known to put a spanner in the works when it comes to enjoying the perfect wedding day.
From interrupting the service to gatecrashing the happy couple's first dance, social media is full of examples of weddings where the kids have ended up taking center stage for all the wrong reasons.
Maybe that's why a significant proportion of Americans are not opposed to the idea of making a wedding a child-free occasion. A 2021 YouGovAmerica survey of 1250 U.S. adults found 41 percent approved of couples asking guests not to bring their children to a wedding.
Even so, the decision to exclude kids can still represent a bone of contention. According to u/Vegetable-Car-5668's Reddit post, she is the youngest of four sisters and while her soon-to-be-wed sibling has no kids, her two older sisters do.
Despite this, she said her sister was planning an "aggressively child free" wedding. While one of her siblings had already opted not to go, the other, who is a single mother, held out hopes of coming along despite having no one to watch her kids.
After what the sister describes as "months of anxiety" she agreed to let her sister go in her place while she stayed at home and looked after her kids.
According to the post, the bride "lost it" when she found out this was the plan and branded her sibling "selfish" for not finding a way to attend as well. This accusation left the woman furious.
She told her she "didn't see the point in going to an event half the family would be missing from" in reference to her other sister's kids. The bride refused to back down though telling her sibling the rule "shouldn't matter" to her since she doesn't have kids. That inflamed the situation further.
"I then said they were better company than her and point blank refused to attend her wedding," the woman wrote. "Even if the kids have a babysitter, which my sister is now offering to pay for, I wouldn't go."
While her siblings believe she is "in the right" the woman has been left feeling "a little bad, but not much" following the clash.
However, Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert at The Protocol School of Texas, felt that the woman was ultimately in the wrong.
"When a bride and groom request 'no kids,' it's most respectful to adhere to their wishes," Gottsman told Newsweek. "In this case, there is clearly more dynamics involved and several strained relationships were present prior to the decision the sister made to stay behind."
She continued: "The sister was given every opportunity to attend, even being offered the opportunity to pay for a babysitter. However, it seems like in this situation there is so much previous animosity, it feels like a passive-aggressive act."
Gottsman concluded that the woman had ultimately failed to adhere to what is expected of any good wedding guest.
"The role of a good guest is to make the host grateful they were invited and it seems that several of the family members weren't willing to put their personal feelings aside to make it special for the bride, their sister," she said. "Weddings are a time to make memories, and this certainly will leave a lasting impression on the bride and groom, her family and fellow guests who no doubt got wind of the situation."
Several people commenting on Reddit were inclined to agree that the woman was in the wrong for boycotting her sister's wedding.
"It's her wedding. She can have a childfree wedding, if she wants," one user wrote. "You don't have to go and neither does your sister, but acting like you have to babysit instead of going to your sister's wedding just tells her you don't care about her."
A second user claimed: "You didn't want to go to the wedding and used this as an excuse."
Another Redditor defended childfree weddings, writing: "It can be hard to talk to people when a kid is interrupting or getting into something every 5 minutes, and most of the time the kids don't even want to be there."
Some, however, backed the woman's choice to boycott the celebration.
"An invitation is not a summons and you really seem like you don't want to deal with them," one person wrote, with another commenting: "Childfree weddings end up most of the time being mother free weddings."
u/Vegetable-Car-5668 has since returned to the post to claim that part of the reason she chose not to attend was because of an ongoing feud between her husband and her sister's husband-to-be. According to the update, he previously got her husband's sister pregnant but then refused to acknowledge the child was his own.
The baby ended up passing away and, according to the woman, her sister's future husband subsequently celebrated being free of his "bank draining baby mama" in a social media post.
Newsweek reached out to u/Vegetable-Car-5668 for comment. We could not verify the details of the case.
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